Was Adorno Right?

I WANT to go back for a minute to Alex Ross’s wonderful piece, “The Naysayers,” on the Frankfurt School. Ross drifts between interpretations here, but he comes up with a very resonant description of what’s gone wrong with our culture over the last few decades:

If Adorno were to look upon the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, he might take grim satisfaction in seeing his fondest fears realized. The pop hegemony is all but complete, its superstars dominating the media and wielding the economic might of tycoons. They live full time in the unreal realm of the mega-rich, yet they hide behind a folksy façade, wolfing down pizza at the Oscars and cheering sports teams from V.I.P. boxes. Meanwhile, traditional bourgeois genres are kicked to the margins, their demographics undesirable, their life styles uncool, their formal intricacies ill suited to the transmission networks of the digital age. Opera, dance, poetry, and the literary novel are still called “élitist,” despite the fact that the world’s real power has little use for them. The old hierarchy of high and low has become a sham: pop is the ruling party.

The Internet threatens final confirmation of Adorno and Horkheimer’s dictum that the culture industry allows the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon—presiding over unprecedented monopolies. Internet discourse has become tighter, more coercive. Search engines guide you away from peculiar words. (“Did you mean . . . ?”) Headlines have an authoritarian bark (“This Map of Planes in the Air Right Now Will Blow Your Mind”). “Most Read” lists at the top of Web sites imply that you should read the same stories everyone else is reading. Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes.

Neither Ross (nor I) see this as the whole story of 21st century culture. There are plenty of good things, too.

But as wrong as Adorno could be about some things (jazz, the jitterbug), he saw some of this coming. And Ross summarizes one side of the equation quite eloquently.

Comments

The dominance of the mass media in our cultural lives that Ross attributes to the 21st century was already fully evolved by the 1950s. Adorno wasn’t looking ahead. He was observing the status quo that had already evolved. Ross thus presents something that happened half a century ago as a relatively new development. “Pop is the ruling party.” You don’t say. What year is his article from, 1960?

The best-selling classical CD last week sold 278 copies. Meanwhile, country starlet Taylor Swift’s 2012 album “Red” sold 3.1 million copies in 10 weeks – one million in the first week alone. These ratios between pop and classical have existed for decades.

All this is indeed a culture crash, but we should note we’re coming upon a wreck that happened a long time ago. The scene is a little less troubling now. The rotting flesh is all gone. Just rusty, mangled metal, skeletons and broken bones, an occasional remnant of hair or rotted clothing. Once in a while a small ray of light here and there on the horizon. Welcome to the wasteland, Mr. Ross, about time you got here, but don’t stay. It won’t fit the New Yorker’s style and ethos…

And to make the neo-liberalism complete, Fink, of course, openly celebrates the marketplace. He also follows a new strategy that is gaining currency by labeling opponents of neo-liberal aesthetic philosophy “racists” — as if Justin Bieber and Adam Lambert were to be equated with Bessie Smith and Louie Armstrong.

Why do most new aesthetic philosophies reach a totalizing norm and then collapse for yet another to form? One could formulate a historical narrative that examines how these philosophies rise and then focus specifically on how they fall in ignominy. Cuture Crash is a recurring phenomenon of history. The narrative could also focus on the individuals who were truly aware of the philosophical collapses of their time and how they tried to respond. (And yes, all narratives have arbitrary qualities, as if that were news.)

It is troubling to be taken to task by someone who’s done as much powerful exposing of the hypocrisies and ideologies of the classical music world as Mr. Osborne. The main thrust of my piece, which I’m flattered upset him enough to be dragged in here, is not that the market is always right. After all, some of the most revered Delta blues pioneers sold about as many records as that best-selling classical CD last week, while Bing Crosby was selling millions.

I wasn’t actually referring to Justin Bieber, but fine, let’s talk about him if you want. If your position is that you find Bieber to be a pale imitation of — oh, I’m blanking here, but whatever African-American vocal artist of his childhood you think he most obviously modeled his vocal persona on — then I have no problem with you saying that. But mostly Bieber gets dragged out to be alliteratively battered into submission by the supposedly superior beauty of Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms, by people who haven’t really absorbed the complexities involved in worshipping at their shrine. In that context, to dismiss Bieber’s musical style as “crap” is to assert that the musical style of white people is better than the musical style of black people. I’ did it myself when I was a classical music snob back in the 1970s; I agreed with all the people in my home town of Boston who laughed and said “disco sucks.” I didn’t stop to think that some of them also thought forced busing sucked, and that black people who came into their neighborhoods sucked as well. Of course, *my* contempt for “Lady Marmalade” was because I loved Mahler, not because I was racist, right? I’m not so sure, anymore. So I walk more lightly around Labelle — and K.C. and the Sunshine Band, for that matter — than I otherwise might.

Of course, you may be without sin, so feel free to feel insulted because you’ve been implicated in a little moment of white privilege and rise up to call me a “neoliberal market fundamentalist.” Look, I get it: I advise lots of global studies theses about how EDM is a musical representation of post-industrial capital flows in a globalized consumer culture; but I also see how the drive of black gospel harmonizes with the Horatio Alger mythos of American capitalism to produce a Berry Gordy.

So let’s put away the insults taken from the Berkeley Barb ca. 1969, OK?

Thanks for the response, Robert. Hardly necessary after Tim’s defense of you. (See the additional comments below.) Your writings are excellent, deeply valuable, and much appreciated by me and countless others. (And McClary’s “Feminine Endings” is one of my bibles, even if I have a little trouble with some of her musical evaluations of Madonna.) Keep up the good work.

Anyway, it’s a bit confusing to see how a lack of respect for Justin Bieber’s work would be borderline racist since he’s white and his aesthetic seems to be white (whatever that might be.) Pop in general is deeply indebted to black music, but thankfully it is still a long line from most black music to Bieber – to use irredeemably vague terms. I use Bieber polemically since his music comes across to me as especially weak both musically and socially, but this isn’t to say that there hasn’t been a lot of pop music over the decades that isn’t of the highest order.

There is also an ambiguity in your article about the marketplace that might confuse people. Is the marketplace unavoidable (Elvis Is Everywhere) because it has been allowed to have a totalizing control over our lives? Or is it unavoidable because of natural economic and aesthetic laws that give it justifiable and totalizing power? Perhaps your vagueness on this point was intentional to provoke thought.

My views, of course, are shaped by having lived in Europe for the last 35 years. The USA allows for a largely unmitigated capitalism while the social democracies of Europe rely on mixed economies. As a result, the USA funds the arts privately while Europeans fund it publically. The consequences are enormous. The so-called high arts have a much stronger position in Europe and attempts are still made to challenge the mass media’s domination of culture. For better or worse, Elvis Isn’t Everywhere.

For any readers who might be interested, I compare the European and American arts funding systems and some of their consequences in this article:

People should unwind themselves. Of course, unthinking ‘consumption’ of any arts for (highbrow or popular) is, er, unthinking. But there’s no harm whatsoever in enjoying, for the sake of argument’ listening to Beethoven on your phone whilst on your way to a football match. Or, conversely, watching Made in Chelsea on TV before heading off to the opera.

I always find Mr. Osborne’s points intelligent and original even if I don’t agree with them.

But I’m laughing a bit at his description of Robert Fink as neoliberal. I don’t always agree with Fink (a friend) either, but I think I’ve had more conversations with him about the perils of neoliberalism and an unhinged marketplace than anyone alive. He >is< a contrarian, and overlaps on some issues with the Poptimists for my taste, but a market-worshiping musicological Tom Friedman he is not!

Then he needs to explain himself much more clearly, because his article clearly expresses a neo-liberal ethos. Most specifically, he clearly challenges those who question the hegemony of the marketplace in culture. Here it is in his own explicit words:

“Implicit in McClary’s position, we’re told, is the danger of intellectual capitulation to popular music’s market hegemony, allowing its economic dominance to set the agenda of cultural criticism and analysis. Devotees of ‘minority’ non-commercial musics like classical, jazz, and avant-garde have sensibly retreated from borderline racist positions that denigrate commercial popular music as “trash” or “crap.” (Well, except when it’s U2.) But, they now ask, can’t we be left in peace to tend our own gardens? Is there no place for a considered elitism? A retreat from the marketplace? Well, says the musicologist who once published a piece called “Elvis Everywhere,” actually no, there isn’t.”

No retreat from the marketplace is possible, eh? Pure neo-liberal philosophy. Milton Friedman could not have put it more succinctly. In reality, there are many avenues of “retreat” and even offense. He would see these avenues practiced by many composers, if only he would remove his pomo ideological blinkers.

I would like to think Robert’s penchant for colorful polemic ran away with what he meant to say, or that he was merely summarizing an opposing view, but the rest of the article only reinforces the above quote.

His odd implication that aficionados of jazz who challenge market hegemony are racist also reinforces the weakness of the article.

It’s one thing to celebrate the achievements of some pop music which is of the highest order, but another for a musicologist, of all people, to make such sweeping and flawed generalizations about culture. A little of the “Wissenschaft” he criticizes might do his article some good, because it would help him ground his observations in social and economic reality.

I should add that some of the weaknesses in Robert’s article stem from internal conflicts within postmodern philosophy itself. Its proponents wanted to democratize culture. They thus embraced pop music. In the process, they equated the marketplace with democracy, as if the masses were making musical choices based on free will and some sort of pervasive natural laws that determine taste.

In reality, the popularity of most pop music is a consciously created social construct built by the music industry in order to make money. It has little to do with natural appeal, and relies mostly on the creation of desire by the market. Edward Bernays, referred to as the father of public relations, essentially made a science of creating mass desire in his book, “Manipulating Public Opinion” – written in 1928, long before Adorno wrote his cultural critiques. His books played a large role in developing the advertising industry. In most pop music, advertising plays a vastly greater role than the music itself, in creating appeal.

It is perhaps no surprise postmodern theorists too often equate the marketplace and its manufacture of desire with democracy. Bernays made the same claim with these chilling words:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

These small elites formulate the tastes of societies. It is thus ironic that postmodernists say critics of the music industry are elitist. Actually, we are the ones challenging the elite — an unseen and unacknowledged elite – what Bernyas described as the “invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.)
Some advance praise:
With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]